Alaska's first offshore oil wells in a generation may be drilled this summer. Popular Mechanics tours one of the rigs that will do the work.

In Seattle, two hulking veterans of the Arctic Ocean float side by side at a pier in Vigor Shipyards. The Kulluk, an oil rig built in 1983 that spent its youth in the Canadian Beaufort Sea, is being refurbished by Royal Dutch Shell. Its neighbor is the Coast Guard vessel Polar Star,the last of America's high-powered icebreakers. Built 40 years ago, the ship hasn't been in active service since 2006, but it is being repaired.

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Both the oil rig and the ice breaker were built when interest in big, ice-hardened machines ran high. Now they are being brought out of retirement for an era in which the Arctic is gaining in geopolitical importance—one in which Shell could as early as this summer become the first oil company in two decades to drill north of the Alaskan coast using floating oil rigs.

Work on the Polar Star won't wrap up until December. But modifications to the Kulluk are just a couple of weeks from completion, and Shell hopes to deploy it to the Alaskan Beaufort Sea this summer. When I visited a few days ago, on May 25, the rig was freshly painted in blue and white; engineers onboard said that virtually every pump, gasket, hose, pipe, and motor had been replaced. The tour had been arranged for Mark Begich, the junior senator from Alaska, who arrived in khaki-colored Dockers and a casual button-down shirt with his press secretary. Begich was flying home to Alaska for the Memorial Day weekend, but found time to stop by the shipyard. Like other successful Alaska politicians, he is a stalwart supporter of oil development.

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Potential New Source of Oil

In June Shell is scheduled to tow the Kulluk away from the pier, on a journey north and west through the Bering Strait and then east of Point Barrow to begin operations in late July. The company plans to drill simultaneously in the Chukchi Sea to the west of Barrow, using the Noble Discoverer drill ship that is also currently at Vigor undergoing modifications. No well drilled this summer would be used for commercial production; they are exploratory holes that will be capped and abandoned at the end of the season.

The coastal shelf north of Alaska shares its geological history with Prudhoe Bay, the giant North Slope oil field. According to the often-cited Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal (CARA) study by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic could contain between 44 and 157 billion barrels of undiscovered recoverable oil, and the USGS considers the Alaska offshore to be the most promising region for exploration. But Shell's plan is controversial. The company has been trying to drill in these waters since 2007, facing opposition from Inupiat who live in the region and from environmental organizations.

The Beaufort and Chukchi Seas are home to the healthiest population of bowhead whales in the world, along with other species of marine mammals. These animals are a nutritional and cultural foundation of the Inupiat villages spread along the coast. Craig George, a biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska, has studied the whales for decades. The bowhead population dropped as low as 1000 animals a century ago as a result of large-scale whaling, he says, but has climbed back to between 13,000 and 15,000. Three other stocks of bowhead around the Arctic have fared worse, largely because of marine traffic and industrial activity, according to George.

For Inupiat whalers, an oil spill is the worst-case scenario. But they also worry about undersea noise disturbing whale migration patterns. "Traditional knowledge and recent studies say whales are extremely sensitive to sound, especially when migrating," George says. "We see deflections at 20 kilometers from a sound source and farther for industrial sites."

The most recent in a series of lawsuits aimed at preventing the drilling doesn't concern oil spills or noise, however. Filed two weeks ago, it challenges Shell's air quality permit for the Beaufort operation under the Clean Air Act.

Air Quality Controversy

Onboard the Kulluk, senior drilling engineer Shawn Gelsinger showed off four gleaming new engines, topped by long rectangular boxes called E-PODs, which are designed to remove pollutants from the engine exhaust before it is vented. Gelsinger says that the E-POD handles nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide (together known as NOx) by combining technical grade urea with exhaust gasses and oxygen, in a catalyst bed made of fiberglass and proprietary materials. The result is plain nitrogen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. "The system cuts the NOx emissions by 90 to 95 percent," says Gelsinger. It also handles a variety of other pollutants. And to control emissions further, Shell says it will use ultra-low-sulfur fuel in all of the vessels it brings to the Arctic.

Still, oil rigs and their support vessels are industrial facilities and significant sources of air pollution. Colin O'Brien, an Anchorage-based attorney with Earthjustice, helped prepare the newest lawsuit, which contends the EPA acted improperly in issuing the Beaufort air quality permit. "We're talking about particulate matter emissions equivalent to hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and the carbon dioxide emissions of 9000 homes," he says. Details of the Beaufort lawsuit haven't been presented yet. However, a lawsuit filed in February to challenge the Chukchi air quality permits argues that the exhaust-cleaning technology being installed on the Discoverer drill ship should also have been required for Shell's support vessels. It contends further that the standards for particulate matter, or soot, in the air should be met at the railing of the rig. Instead, the standards are being enforced 500 meters away, at the edge of a zone that is to be kept clear of outside ships. Shell officials counter that no other vessels traveling in the region are required to meet air emissions standards, and that even the 500-meter mark is miles from the nearest human settlement.

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Neither lawsuit is likely to prevent drilling from proceeding this summer. However, Shell still needs to obtain the final permits to drill from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Meanwhile, onboard the Kulluk upgrades are nearing completion.

Drilling Draws Nearer

As Sen. Begich left us on the main deck to make his next engagement, I asked Mark Duplantis, Shell's well delivery manager in Alaska, about one of the two towering blowout preventers (BOPs) standing one level below the drill floor. The BOP is designed to be a last line of defense if a well gets out of control. In the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, a BOP failed, allowing oil to spew into the Gulf of Mexico in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

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Unlike the BOP used by the Deepwater Horizon, the unit looming overhead had two sets of blind shear rams, each capable of cutting through the drill pipe to shut off a flow of oil, gas, and drilling mud in an emergency. Duplantis also pointed out four annular preventers, which can tighten around the drill string or open hole to close off the well.

"Having two BOPs is a requirement here—the backup BOP would be used if the rig had to go into relief drilling mode," Duplantis said. To kill an out-of-control well, crews would dig a second hole to intersect the first one, allowing them to permanently plug it with layers of concrete and drilling mud. Shell is also bringing a subsea containment system to the region similar to the one that stopped the flow of oil from the Macondo Prospect well, until a relief well could be drilled.

None of that technology should be used, and it probably won't be. At least not this year. In the long run, of course, Shell's goal is not to drill and cap exploratory wells, but to create an offshore oil industry with many wells producing crude and sending it south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Other companies will drill, too, including ConocoPhillips as soon as 2014. If all that unfolds, the risks and wildlife impacts will increase.

Over lunch the Shell engineers sounded determined not to make a misstep on one of the most closely watched drilling expeditions they had ever seen. The Kulluk cooks served up fried catfish, crab, shrimp, and hush puppies—all of which complemented the Louisiana accents of the offshore veterans at my table. Most of these guys had worked internationally and would again. To them, traveling a couple of thousand miles to drill a few exploratory wells in shallow water felt like a familiar challenge. "It's all about responsible energy development," Duplantis said, "with the emphasis on responsible."

The 2012 Alaska drilling season was nearly here, and they were looking forward to it.